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Have I seen this before?
Given there seems to be more channels than ads every hour (and that’s a lot), it is fair to say there’s a lot on television. No doubt about that, but one thing that is missing is a show called Deja Vu.
A show about getting the distinct feeling you’ve seen or heard something just like the sights and sounds you are presently experiencing before . . . somewhere.
And wait a minute . . . haven’t I noted this before?
No I don’t think so, although some distant bells of recall are ringing.
It is an odd phenomenon this deja vu thing and I don’t think I would be incorrect to suggest all of us have experienced it at some time of our lives.
It can be wonderfully eerie as you kind of know what is about to happen next because for some inexplicable reason you get the strong feeling it has happened before.
While it wasn’t quite a candidate for deja vu, the “day the song came on” was another of those genuinely eerie moments which make you wonder if there is a script to this unpredictable sitcom we call life.
I had been talking about a very obscure song with my brothers, from the era when we wore trousers with bells on the bottoms.
A song we dismissed as a typical example of a one-hit wonder band . . . a song we hadn’t heard for probably 45 years.
So I’m driving home and what emerges from the radio?
That song.
Right out of left field . . . right out of a vague and throwaway conversation less than 30 minutes earlier.
And (on the deja vu trail now) I get the distinct feeling that situation might have even happened before.
This strange sensation is also embraced by that flat screen called a television set. Not so much the set itself, more the content it churns out.
It is no longer uncommon to hear people, in the wake of watching something or at the start of watching watching, to remark with slight bemusement, “I’m sure I’ve seen this before . . . although there were different people in it . . . I think”.
Which is where I reckon we need a show called Deja Vu which shows very familiar things . . . things the show only
screened a week earlier.
Yes, I acknowledge that such a show would be completely pointless, but over the past decade the expansion of television time and the need for more content has kind of led to a new genre called “completely pointless” shows . . . because something has to fill the holes created by running channels constantly.
It has also led to a virtual glut of shows about the same subjects. They come under the banner of “reality” shows of course, and they have the potential to become very, very familiar.
A few face changes but the content stirs up the feelings of . . . deja vu.
One of the relatively recent additions to the reality landscape are the shows about doing up houses.
We have one called The Block which I tend to steer a path away from as it’s more a soap opera drama than a show about doing up a house . . . they just seek argumentative colleagues and contestants, but then I guess that’s the whole point to trying to make it entertaining to watch.
I prefer to stand outside and look for passing orbital satellites but, hey, each to their own.
It’s an odd thing, but I don’t think we have ever aired a show about doing up houses on the cheap, or whatever, which was made in the United States.
They tend to emerge from the UK, and at this stage of television “renovation” proceedings there appears no end to what can be manufactured.
A fortnight ago the new series intriguingly titled The One Pound Houses emerged on TV1, and now there’s another one set to lay its foundations also on TV1 and it has a slightly familiar feel to it, being titled Ugly House to Lovely House.
Here’s the deja vu component . . . haven’t we been here before?
You know, making up a house . . . from munted to mansion. And it’s fronted by another familiar component in the form of George Clarke who has a penchant for houses and what can be done with ´ them. A
He was out here last year and fronted a series called Tiny House and of course made a splash with his show back in the UK called Amazing Spaces.
So yes, if you do happen to tune in to watch him work with architects and homeowners in the quest of transforming an ordinary dwelling into something special then you can be forgiven for going all deja vu-ey and thinking “he looks familiar”.
Yep, the swathe of cooking and talent shows here is being joined by shows about doing up houses, although the irony is, we seem to have a shortage in this land of the subjects at the heart of this genre.
So how about a show called Are There Any Affordable Houses Left to Buy?
And the subtitle could be “we don’t wanna do it up . . . we just wanna somehow buy it and live in it”.